Sweet River Studios

It took me a  while to figure out which 2 fabrics I wanted to border the portrait. I thought that since the center is a light colored fabric that I would have a small border (1") in brown then another (2") border in a lighter color after that making the center square 21". I also wanted mitered corners. I have never done mitered border corners but it doesn't seem all that hard and I always like to throw in an element that I don't know how to do. But before I get to the borders, I need to work on that lovely background. It's not a huge area to try to quilt and I may not wind up doing it at all but its seems like there should be something. Border Fabric My MIL and I went to our local quilt shop looking for fabric to put around the portrait. I wanted a small 1/2" - 1" darker fabric around the portrait and a lighter 2-2.5" fabric around that but they both had to work with the cream/applique blocks and the portrait. Picking out fabric...

After I got the backgrounds painted on my portraits, I decided to take my practice portrait and try to put a light wash of black on dad's jacket so the pencil lines would blend in a bit more. That went horribly wrong. I had black ink seep into the bride's veil and into the white collar and in his boutonniere. I also added tulle to the veil and thread painting to the dress.  After all that, I don't think it really did anything for the picture, which was a bit surprising for me. I also forgot to fix the neckline of the dress. I needed to find the center and flip the left side to the right to make it even. I could only see one side in the picture and forgot to make the other side the same. Again, I'm glad this one is just practice. I also started to define the tiara on mom's head piece. The picture basically showed a white blob. There was no definition whatsoever and I had a hard time seeing even the basic shape. So I basically made it up using seed beads. This was...

I haven't done any portrait work in a really long time and I'm glad some of the things I learned came roaring back to me as I worked on these. I did this picture using nothing but colored pencil and it turned out well since I had a bit of practice on the first 2. This one is much better looking and is a fairly good likeness. I think it'll get a bit better after I get the white veil/dress/tiara and the background tinted. Dad doesn't look quite so alien like, which is always a bonus! The streaky look of the color pencils though are really bothering me. Especially in dad's black jacket. I'll continue trying to smooth those out and if that doesn't help then I may put on a light wash of black ink to try to smooth it out. Unfortunately, dad's mouth/lip area isn't all that good but it looks fairly accurate compared to the picture. I think it was a perfect storm so to speak. He's leaning slightly towards mom, head turned towards the camera, ...